Fiction Pick of the Week: "Lollie"
New neighbors meet, told from a unique point of view.
Weather
When the River Rises
In a few short hours, a normal evening along Texas’s Blanco River became the site of a deadly flash flood.
Black Ice, Near-Death, and Transcendence on I-91
A car trip north ends in a terrifying slide off the highway.
Fiction Pick of the Week: "The Drive South"
Two friends wait out a storm in Waffle House on their way to uncertainty.
Welcome to the Age of Climate Migration
How extreme weather, which displaced more than a million people last year, could reshape America.
Fiction Pick of the Week: "It Falls Away Slowly"
Two men examine their breakup.
Fiction Pick of the Week: "Briar Switch"
A dangerous trek to visit a dying father.
Fiction Pick of the Week: "Other Gods"
A tornado causes physical and psychological turmoil in a religious community.
"The next morning, I ran through the streets in my pajamas, screaming for somebody, anybody. I finally found Daddy standing at the edge of the detention pond behind the church. It was full of all sorts of stuff: cars, tree trunks, gas grills, hot water heaters, and two bodies. The bodies were naked, and I didn’t recognize them at first. But then I saw their faces. It was Brother Mack and the second Hillyer girl. They were facing each other, impaled by a metal post from the chain link fence, pushed together like two pieces of chicken on a kebab."
Scorcher
A heatwave serves as a catalyst for personal and physical breakdowns.
"If Lily hadn’t intervened she probably wouldn’t have seen anything. She wouldn’t have looked up from Coral Casey and her sea critter pals. She wouldn’t have glanced at the maroon Lawson Shrub Service truck speeding down the road. She wouldn’t have bit her lip at the sight of Tim Lawson in the front, his arm wrapped around a woman in the passenger seat. She wouldn’t have glimpsed the unmistakable head of her mother, hair too long for a woman her age and streaked with the fuchsia hue favored by teenage experimenters."
Storm In a Teacup
Workers and diners in a British cafe experience a small act of weather-related magic.
"None of the others notice Tommy pull up a chair and seat himself next to the counter, his eyes level with the cup. The furious churn of the storm grips him. He hears a hurried tinkling as tiny fists of hail sugar the bottom of the cup. For the first time in years he does not think of Alice. The storm’s rumble elongates, thunder and lightening overlapping. A tinny crescendo rattles inside the ceramic shelter of the cup."
Here Is Your Weather
A weather forecaster finds her life unraveling in multiple ways.
"Broadcast meteorologists, on the other hand, were supposed to smile through everything. That was one of the first lessons Beth had learned. It didn’t matter if you were talking about heat waves or blizzards or forest fires. Mother Nature was never bad news! Nothing we can’t handle! Her first broadcast job was in Mobile, Alabama, and she had kept smiling as a Category 5 hurricane spiraled toward their coast, kept smiling when the TV studio went dark and the walls shuddered. It was exhausting, all that smiling."
The Weatherman Is Not a Moron
How meteorologists are improving their predictive powers.
